Effect of Product Appearance and Performance on the Consumer`s Affection in the Design of Mobile PhonesKim, Sung-Yup; Park, Sung-Joon; Kim, Sung-Min; Jung, Eui-S.;

Abstract

Product developers nowadays must consider not only the technological satisfaction of consumers but their affective needs as well. These affective needs are greatly affected by the appearance and performance functions of the product, which are simply called in this study appearance-based affection and performance-based affection. This study examined these two affective factors that must be considered while designing mobile phones. Extracted relationship between the two factors was processed in five steps. The first step includes gathering potential affective expressions that are needed to evaluate the levels of consumer`s affection for mobile phone design in the pool of adjectives. In the second step, a simple frequency analysis was done from a consumer survey to extract frequently used affective expression. The third step was to extract primary tasks for mobile phones and to perform an experiment or a survey for the evaluation of mobile phones using those tasks. Representative affective factors were then extracted in the fourth step based on factor analysis. Finally, using ANOVA, the extracted representative affective factors were prioritized to draw a relationship between appearance-based affection and performance-based affection. The result of this study suggests each of appearance-based affections and performance-based affections that should be considered in designing mobile phones.